Embrace The Future: Vote Yes

May 21, 2000

History is in the making.

Across the Atlantic, the European Union is embracing the future with a landmark pact reached Friday that clears the last hurdle for China's historic entry into the World Trade Organization. On this side of the Atlantic, it is still unclear whether the U.S. House also will look forward or turn its back on the future.

Organized labor is pulling out all the stops to defeat the measure granting Permanent Normal Trade Relations for China. President Clinton, backed by a bipartisan bevy of political, diplomatic and business heavyweights, is putting the full weight of his presidency behind PNTR. He will lay out the case again in a televised address to the nation Sunday.

The case is this: China already has open access to the U.S. market; this trade pact requires China to open its market to our goods and services. This trade pact means China--for the first time--must comply with WTO rules. We grant PNTR to nearly every other nation on earth. The way to change China is to engage it.

If PNTR doesn't pass, China still gets ushered into the WTO but the U.S. jeopardizes the hard-won concessions it negotiated last fall. The vote is now set for Wednesday and it is still much too close to call.

How it can be argued that allowing U.S. companies access to a market of 1.2 billion people--one of every five people on the planet lives in China--can harm us is unfathomable. But let's get to the heart of it. It may cost organized labor jobs. That is what concerns organized labor.

Congress has each year for two decades debated China's human rights abuses before renewing--again--its trade status. In that time, China massacred students in Tiananmen Square, cracked down repeatedly on dissidents and threatened to send missiles across the Taiwan Straits--all deplorable but illustrating just how little weight that annual showy debate in Congress carries.

Opponents of PNTR argue that without that annual review, China will have no incentive to change. This view assumes that China is under no internal or other external pressures to change and will react only to finger-wagging by Congress. What a preposterous and arrogant assumption. The pressures facing China as it tries to build a modern economy while maintaining political control are immense.

Republican congressional leaders said Friday they will include in the PNTR measure a new bipartisan watchdog commission to monitor Chinese human rights. That may tip the balance. Right now, everyone is still counting noses.

At the end of the day, U.S. Rep. Rod Blagojevich of Chicago said he'll vote no. But he also said, "I believe in the power of trade to spread our values around the world and change societies for the better." So do we, congressman. Embrace the future.